One of the puzzles of the war in the Ukraine, debated by those watching through sources outside of Western media, is why are the Ukrainians doing what they are doing in this war. Their tactics make little sense and suggest the over all strategy is something other than what has been stated. In fact, official statements from the Zelensky government have become absurdly strident. They bring back memories of Baghdad Bob during the American invasion of Iraq.

The initial phase of the war had the Russians dashing in, probably hoping for a negotiated settlement based on the Minsk accords. Some think they underestimated the Ukrainian capabilities and willingness to fight. There are lots of people who claim to be psychics, knowing what was in the minds of the Russian planners, but no one knows what the Russians expected. All we know is they got a bloody nose in the opening weeks and had to reconfigure their war plans.

This is the nature of war. The old line about no war plan lasting first contact with the enemy is a cliché because it is true. The Russians had to change gears and they did that in the early spring. They settled into a strategy of shelling the Ukrainian positions with their superior artillery and missile systems. They also gained air superiority so they can hunt down Ukrainian targets all over the country. This is a low-cost way to slowly and methodically grind down the Ukrainian military.

Here is the puzzle. Why have the Ukrainians not responded to this change in tactics so as not to be slowly ground down by the Russians? Logic says they should have withdrawn from the Donbas to more defensible positions. This would have preserved their best troops and much of their equipment. They could have appealed to the West for better air defense systems to protect their army as they prepared for a counter offensive at some point in the future.

No one really seems to know how much Western military gear has flowed into Ukraine, but the best guess is more than enough to supply a million man army. The Europeans dumped a fair bit of old equipment onto Ukraine, but they have also supplied a fair bit of modern equipment as well. The Russians have modern equipment, but the militias, who are doing the bulk of the fighting, are relying on Soviet era tanks and armored personnel carriers so this old stuff is not worthless.

Of course, one of the lessons of this war is that old planes, trucks and tanks can be repurposed as unmanned vehicles. The Russians are actively converting their old aircraft into crude drones. They are not as good as the high end stuff, but it is better than scrapping them. Ukraine could have been doing this as well if they had pulled back from the Donbas and been preparing for a counter offensive. Instead, the old equipment has been hurled into the meatgrinder of the Donbas.

The elephant in the room whenever discussing the war in the Ukraine is the massive amount of corruption. We know from the Trump years that many American politicians were on the payroll of corrupt Ukrainian firms. We know the State Department is full of Ukrainian operatives. We know that what ties these people to the Ukrainian government is highly corrupt Ukrainian oligarchs. Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, an oligarch controlled energy monopoly in Ukraine.

That is the key to unriddling the Ukraine war strategy. The key players in American foreign policy only care about harming Russia. The neocon obsession with Russia goes back generations now. They have made clear on multiple occasions that their only goal in the Ukraine is to inflict as much damage on the Russians as possible. This has come from senior people in the Biden regime, as well as various characters operating in the unofficial foreign policy establishment.

Take the Russia obsessed foreign policy establishment and join it to the hyper-corrupt Ukrainian regime and you have the makings of a grand grift. The other piece of it is the Military Industrial Complex, which will sell NATO countries trillions in new arms over the next decade, to replace what is going to Ukraine. The Ukraine has become a massive money laundering scheme. Billions flow into the place with little or no accounting and much of it ends up in anonymous bank accounts.

This is where the Ukrainian ware strategy fits into the scam. The neocons need a narrative to sell the politicians and the public. The “heroic Ukrainian defenders willing to fight to the last man” is the story they initially sold. Over the last few months, the new story has been “If the heroic Ukrainian defenders just had better weapons, they could take the fight to the Ruskies!” The myth of the wonder weapon, of course, works nicely in the Raytheon brochure.

Meanwhile, the actual Ukrainian fighters are hunkered down into massive, fortified locations while the Russians shell them day and night. Reports from the front suggest few of the weapons are making it to the men. CBS did a report suggesting that only 30% of weapons have gone into battle. They were forced to recant, but their reporting comports with what others have said. The fact is, no one knows where this stuff is going or if it is even useful to the soldiers.

The whole thing relies on defending a one thousand mile front in the Donbas against an endless artillery barrage. Imagine a front that stretched from New York to Miami and along the way cities have been turned into massive, fortified bunker complexes and you have a good idea of what is happening. The Russians shell these fortifications at will and the Ukrainians have no chance to take the fight to the Russians. They just have to sit there and take the pounding for public relations reasons.

Even by current standards, this sounds amazingly cynical, but stop and think about what happened during the Covid panic. The people who made tens of billions on a dangerous, experimental vaccine are not going to blink at sacrificing tens of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainians to make billions in profits. The people who turned America into a pirate’s cove are taking the strategy global. Everything is a grift and no grift is too bloody or monstrous.

At some point, a marketing plan with the phrase “to the last Ukrainian” in it will run out of Ukrainians to sell it. There are ongoing shakeups in the Ukrainian leadership so that part of the grift may be starting to crack. There are growing rumors of defections in the military as they wake up to what is happening to them. Of course, the truly terrifying winter that lies ahead for all of Europe cannot be ignored. The reality of Ukraine will become apparent and then what happens?

History says not much. Covid is a good guide. There is no doubt that trust in the institutions has declined as a result of the Covid scam. The ongoing effects of the vaccine could blow up into a major scandal. None of which has moved people into the streets, but there has been a cumulative effect on the public psyche. A collapse in Ukraine would be another blow to the regime. Still, it is hard to see this being the straw that breaks the camel’s back, but crazier things have happened.

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